The Confounding Complexity of Blog Migration

I have been using Drupal to manage this blog for almost 20 years (my first mention of this was in 2005). Over the years I've managed to drag the site forward from Drupal version to Drupal version, often with considerable hair-pulling involved. 

The last major upgrade was in May 2014 when I upgraded from Drupal 6 to Drupal 7. Longtime readers will recall that it was in fall of that year that everything went sideways, and it's partly because of that sideways that that Drupal 7 has calcified here for more than a decade. 

It's not that I didn't have time to distract myself with digital tchotchke maintenance—Lord knows that I took many opportunities to dig myself into digital rabbit holes by way of distracting myself from the swirling unpredictatude. It's that upgrading Drupal, especially a Drupal site that's had years to grow aftermarket tentacles, requires concentration. Concentration, especially of the multi-day sort, is something I haven't had an oversupply of in forever.

At long last, if you're reading this post, you're reading it in a shiny new Drupal 10 version of the blog.

It's not that I suddenly grew a rich reserve of concentration; ironically, it's cash that's been the motivating factor. Three or four years ago, while wandering around in one of those digital rabbit holes, I managed to run out of disk space on the Amazon server where I host the blog. In a rush to solve the issue, I increased the size of my disk (in technical terms I "increased the size of the EBS root volume"). This had the positive effect of solving my disk space issue. It had the unexpected negative effect of raising my Amazon bill from $50/month to $250/month.

The rub: it's very easy—trivial—to increase the size of an EBS root volume. To decrease it, though, isn't supported out of the box, and while there are mystical incantations you can recite carefully to achieve this through other means, these incantations require concentration. See above.

I don't have $200 a month in spare cash to donate to Amazon. But the lack of concentration—careful, multi-day concentration—meant that, until now, I had effectively no choice.

Finally, earlier this summer, I decided that I had just enough concentration to pull off an upgrade.

And so I stopped writing three weeks ago, and focused myself on what I needed to do to pull a 10 year old Drupal 7 blog into a modern Drupal 10 blog. In the end it turned out to be not nearly as complex as I imagined, in part because one of my last big jobs for Almanac.com before I left that project was a similar project, so I knew the general lay of the land.

I'm not done yet: you can consider this version of ruk.ca to be something akin to a roughed-in basement. There's a floor, studs, and some drywall. But there's a lot that's missing. More concentration needed.

An assortment of what you'll find missing as of this writing:

• Posts with audio attached (my "podcast," of sorts) are missing the audio.
• The main RSS feed is working, but perhaps not completely; the other RSS feeds -- comments, favourites, etc. -- are works in process.
• The explorable archive of posts is missing.
• The search page works, but is also a work in progress.
• The little hack I've long had in place that links text in post that I write like [[Olle Jonsson]] and links to that term in my wiki isn't ported forward yet.

But: there are 25 years of posts here that are (mostly) intact. And I can write new ones. Like this one.

Thank you for your patience as I tape and sand the drywall, add carpet and furniture, install some lights.

It's good to be back.